


Cause/Effect

by tenyearsgone



Series: 365 Writing Challenge [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 09:51:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/685605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenyearsgone/pseuds/tenyearsgone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They've been brought here by a simple chain of cause and effect.<br/>From the <a href="http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=22824805&page=1">365 writing challenge</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cause/Effect

It’s late at night and 221B is eerily quiet, as it has been for a long time. There’s no bubbling of chemicals in the kitchen, no strains of violin, nor the sound of frustrated pacing. It’s just John now, sitting in his armchair, a cup of tea in his hands and regrets to keep him company. The only sounds in 221B Baker Street are the thumping of John’s cane as he shuffles about and the occasional stifled sob.

He hasn’t had the courage to move out. It was – is – painful, of course, to be in the house that once was _alive_ with the sound of him, and now is almost as silent as the grave. But then he thinks of Sherlock’s last words on St. Bart’s roof, telling him he was a fake, a _liar,_ and so John stays. It’s his silent way of saying he believes in Sherlock, a quieter, more personal way of scrawling ‘I believe in Sherlock Holmes’ on walls. It’s the only way not to let himself forget his friend, not to let him slowly fade from his memories. He needs to keep the world’s only consulting detective – his friend – alive, at least in his mind. So whenever John unearths something of Sherlock’s, whether a shirt or a glass beaker he was fond of or notes from a case, he lets himself feel the sharp little stabs of pain, needs them to remind himself that he was real, more real than anything else in John’s life. With Sherlock, life had turned from shades of grey to vibrant color, every sensation, every emotion had been highlighted and heightened, made perfect. Now life’s become black and white, monotonous. John feels the need of Sherlock’s presence in his bones, needs him to make life real.

*

It’s been five months since the fall, and John is once more in front of Sherlock’s grave. He never brings flowers, because he knows Sherlock wouldn’t see the point. At times, though, he likes to think that Sherlock would have liked to observe them decompose, if only to figure out some interesting new property of mold.

He’d known since the start – since the moment he saw him jump off that roof – that Sherlock had done something very stupid and noble, all for him – a useless army doctor. So that had made him think, all the way back to when they had met, when it had all started in St. Bart’s. He recalls all the little things, the looks, the gestures, that had become part of everyday, all the little ways they’d become part of each other, fitting in the gaps of their lives. He thinks of how quickly they’d moved on from flatmates to friends, until they were prepared to die for the other, to die together.

John remembers all the looks Sherlock had given him, the gestures, the way he was always in his personal space, going past propriety to meld and shape his soul into something new. He thinks of all the odd ways Sherlock had shown his affection, like holding up the police tape at crime scenes, and of how quickly John responded, how much he’d started to depend on Sherlock to go on with his life.

He also remembers how cold and distant Sherlock had been with anything else, and he wonders if, perhaps, he’d never met John, things would have ended the same way.

If Lestrade and the police had believed him, Sherlock wouldn’t have been forced to run away like a fugitive, convincing everyone he really was a fake.

If they’d defeated Moriarty before the Adler case, Sherlock wouldn’t have had to run in the first place.

If Sherlock hadn’t cared for John so much, none of Moriarty’s toying and scheming would have started.

If John had never met Sherlock, he would probably be still alive.

It’s simple, really: they’d come to this point by a simple chain of cause and effect, the events following one another in procession, set off by the fluttering butterfly wings of their meeting. That simple contact had expanded and grown to enormous proportions until it brought them (him) here, to this living torment. Each moment Sherlock spent with John had been a further descent into hell, yet another step towards the void.

John’s knees give up, and he presses salty tears onto freezing grey marble as he prays for a miracle he knows will never come.


End file.
